“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, 400 years ago. Now it’s more like all the world’s a screen. As they pretty much have since the first attempts to regulate billboard advertising, during the Lyndon Johnson administration. The only thing standing in the way of these industry game changers was the HBA stipulation against intermittent, flashing, or moving lights. LEDs had historically been understood to fall into that category. Wachtel says drivers aren’t likely to admit that their eyes were locked on a flashy billboard when they crashed, but studies show that “if the signs take the driver’s eyes off the road for two seconds or longer, the risk of a crash goes way up,” especially in high-traffic environments like Chicago....

Three things you can count on in the upcoming mayoral election—which isn’t until February but, let’s face it, is all anyone in town is talking about. What’s that you say? You don’t think blacks will vote for a white candidate in a race against black candidates, even with an Obama endorsement? Please, you’re confusing blacks with whites. In Chicago, black voters have traditionally been more tolerant and open-minded than white ones....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bourne franchise continues, starring Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) as a new superspy in the absence of Matt Damon. Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) responds to this challenge by fragmenting the espionage narrative into several discrete story lines that take place in various locations, much as Alfred Hitchcock structured his underrated spy adventure Topaz (1969). Unfortunately the movie becomes less interesting as the pieces come together and the complex mystery of the first hour gives way to more straight-ahead action sequences....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past few years hard-rock radio has been an endless parade of interchangeable postgrunge bands that either churn out party-time anthems filled to the brim with intensely concentrated misogyny or wallow in power ballads about chicks who’ve done them wrong. But until now the only ways for fans to really get in on all that free-floating woman hating have been to (a) become a groupie, so the band can casually exploit and dispose of you, or (b) have a girlfriend you don’t mind being a groupie for the band....

Back in the days before YouTube, videos went viral by hand—people dubbed and traded VHS tapes, and if you wanted to see weird junk videos you had to know somebody. In the late 90s my best suppliers were three guys who lived together in an apartment, where I would hang out and let them screen whatever bizarre tapes they wanted. One day they showed me something called The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program....

Q I’m a 41-year-old, very attractive, happily married woman. My husband and I have been together for 15 years. When we first met, the sex was absolutely incredible. After we got married, the sex was good, not great. This was because we were busy raising our children. (My husband had custody of four-year-old twins, children from his first marriage, when we married.) The reason I know our sex life suffered while we were busy raising the kids is that after the girls went off to college, things went right back to absolutely incredible....

Award-winning art director, local Krampus expert, and man-about-town Monte Beauchamp, the brains behind Blab!, has a couple of lovely new books out. The story of cartoons—the multibillion-dollar industry that has affected all corners of our culture, from high to low—is ultimately the story of the artists who pioneered the form, and the story of the enduring characters they created: Mickey Mouse, Superman, and The Cat in the Hat, to name a few....

The Hugh Hefner of Britain, Paul Raymond worked his way up from humble beginnings to become the richest man in the UK, building an empire in the 1960s and ’70s on strip clubs, nude theater, girlie mags, and Soho real estate. By most accounts, though, Raymond was a shy, awkward man whose stammering public statements hardly fit the image of a taboo-busting porn entrepreneur. “He was a reserved sort of person,” his friend Noel Botham told biographer Paul Willetts....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two long plastic foldout tables were set with plates of quartered limes and squeeze bottles of red and green salsa. Abdominous middle-aged men sat alongside their wives and kids, idly chatting, eating tacos, and pulling on cans of Pepsi and Modelo, not giving the firefighters a glance. This wasn’t a family gathering: the people eating were customers. But nor was it a legit business (which is why I’m not going to say exactly where I was)....

Rahm Emanuel got the mayor’s race rolling on Saturday, formally declaring his candidacy to supporters at Coonley elementary school on the north side, in a speech in which he also released the results of his listening tour. Emanuel told his supporters at Coonley he would: improve the city’s schools, make the streets safer, pave the way for more and better jobs, and put the city’s finances in order. He’d change the culture of city government so it was no longer “an insider’s game, serving primarily the lobbyists and well-connected....

I know it’s wrong to gloat, but residents of Hyde Park showed the University of Chicago a thing or two by voting the 39th precinct of the Fifth Ward dry in an Election Day referendum. In 2006 the university bought the hospital and announced it would lease it to White Lodging of Merrillville, Indiana, whose chairman, Bruce White, is a member of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Bullet bras came about because they didn’t have the same fabrics we do now. It was an engineering thing. They couldn’t make a rounded boob. It was the best shape they could get out of their fabric, and then it became a fad, so they exaggerated it and made it fashionable....

Jim Skafish, front man for defunct Chicago art-punk outfit Skafish, appears in Urgh! toward the end, leading his band through a campily sacrilegious performance of their frantic signature number, “Sign of the Cross.” A few weeks ago he got an e-mail from someone who’d noticed that the film had been released in early August via Warner Archive—a service that burns DVD-Rs on demand, to save the label the up-front costs of a proper pressing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city-run shelter the family lives in is “a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers,” Andrea Elliott, the reporter, writes. “It is no place for children,” but 280 children live there—280 of the 22,000 homeless children in New York, the most since the Great Depression....

A389 is a metal label out of Baltimore run by a really cool workaholic named Dom who’s obsessed with 90s metal and hardcore. When he’s not putting out records by bands that are either veterans of that scene or deeply indebted to it, he’s making zines and kids’ clothes and documentaries and stuff. Part of Dom’s thing with A389 is making the music he facilitates freely available to listeners, so he makes everything the label releases streamable on Bandcamp, and frequently releases collections of music for free download....

774-239-0423chicagobodywork.com Move over, morphine. As someone who has endured her fair share of muscle pain, I have turned to various treatments over the years, everything from Thai massage to electrical nerve stimulation. Opiates, of course, can provide near-instant relief, but who wants to end up a drug addict? And anyway, the point is is to heal pain, not to mask it. That’s where massage therapist Rachael McIntosh comes in. McIntosh, of one-woman shop Chicago Body Work, is a pain slayer....

William Friedkin and Tracy Letts are a match made in heaven—or, perhaps more accurately, hell. Friedkin, a Chicago native, made a name for himself directing The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), brutal dramas that became touchstones of the so-called “New Hollywood.” Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble and a Pulitzer Prize winner for August: Osage County, launched his career as a playwright with Killer Joe, about a sadistic Dallas cop who moonlights as a hit man, and followed it with Bug, chronicling the romance between a lonely middle-aged woman and a paranoid schizophrenic who believes his skin is crawling with insects....

Presented by the International Latino Cultural Center, the 26th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 16, through Thursday, April 29, at Instituto Cervantes, 31 W. Ohio; Landmark’s Century Centre, 2828 N. Clark; and smaller venues throughout the city and suburbs. Tickets for most screenings are $10; $9 for students, seniors, and the disabled; and $8 for ILCC members. A festival pass, good for a dozen admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members....

Last week, ten days after the first Expo Chicago, Tony Karman’s resurrection of the once glorious Navy Pier art fairs, Karman took part in a panel considering the value of events so blatantly geared to the 1 percent in a city with a plateful of 99-percenter challenges. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But a show aspiring to international status has to maintain a delicate balance: it can’t tip too heavily into local art without looking provincial....

Some things change, some don’t. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Designed by Antunovich Associates to blend with its Lincoln Park neighborhood, the 15,200-square-foot, $7.8 million, red-brick facility looks pretty much like any other storefront, except for a large arched glass window, like a big open mouth, in the middle of its public face on Fullerton. Inside, there’s 4,000 square feet of display space divided into five galleries on the first two floors; on the third floor, along with offices, are amenities the DPAM never had before, like a lecture hall/event space and a state-of-the-art teaching room....